Dr Florence Hazrat

My research interests lie in literary form and rhetoric, particularly of early modern literature. My doctoral thesis was on the refrain in music and literature of the sixteenth century, and examined the mnemonic and compositional functions of repeated lines in the cultural productions of three socio-literary environments, including oral traditions, the court of Henry VIII, and the Shakespearean stage. I have published on Shakespeare’s uses of music in the creation of community, and Thomas Wyatt’s manipulation of song forms. 

During my postdoc at the University of Geneva, I worked in a collaborative project on early modern German versions of Shakespeare plays. I translated a German adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew from 1672 into English, and closely compared the later version with its Shakespearean original, providing a detailed annotation, a critical introduction of the history of shrew plays on the continent, and an analysis of the relationship between the English and the German play. The edition will be published in the Arden Shakespeare series, entitled An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good.

I am examining brackets (or parentheses) in early modern romance. My project investigates what it means to read the typographical sign as well as broader senses of narrative insertion and digression, covering romances in prose, poetry, and drama. I am currently writing a book on punctuation in literature and culture for Reaktion Books, London.